DIGITAL EDITION

Green Printing for Green Living

(July 2010) posted on Tue Jul 13, 2010

Vomela's Eco Shoppe work features eco-friendly graphics.

click an image below to view slideshow

With more consumers joining the green movement, health retailer The Vitamin Shoppe opened The Eco Shoppe—a new concept store offering various sustainable living products for home, garden, pets, and more—in Austin, Texas.

The retailer expected the store to achieve Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification. This included using construction materials such as bamboo composites, low-VOC glues and adhesives, and, of course, eco-friendly graphics. For its graphics, The Eco Shoppe turned to Vomela (www.vomela.com) the print provider for all The Vitamin Shoppe locations.

Production Retail design firm Kiku Obata and Company created the graphics and provided print-ready images. No adjustments were needed until proofs were output. “We had to do proofs for color approval and did have to tweak colors from the original output,” Vomela account manager Michelle Malkan says. Vomela supplied hard proofs using the same machines and media that would be used for final output.

In keeping with the client’s green expectations, two “green” media were selected for the project: Designtex Duraprene, a vinyl alternative made from fused and pressurized cellulose fibers from renewable-resource trees and paper-mill byproducts, then bonded with natural latex; and Xanita Mondi Xtreme, a recyclable and repulpable rigid media produced from 92-percent recycled material.

All graphics were manually trimmed, requiring no further finishing or lamination, the company reports. Total project time took two weeks, and San Antonio-based Merchco Services handled the install.

“More and more of our suppliers are promoting eco-friendly materials and the range of products is expanding more rapidly all the time. We’re also seeing more inquiries and demand from customers, especially retailers," says Malkan.